In Kenya, Farmers Grow Their Own WayThousands of grassroots, African-led efforts are building locally rooted alternatives to the chemical agriculture promoted by the Gates Foundation and Monsanto.
Yes Magazine: Like most of the farmers in this area, the Tumaini women explained, they had followed the advice of outsiders (mostly large-scale foreign NGOs) who told them that yields would increase if they purchased special seeds rather than saving their own and applied chemicals to their crops. But the women soon learned the long-term consequences of these methods. When the rains stopped, crops didn't produce well... Stripped from years of chemical use, the soil couldn't retain what little moisture was left. Yields declined and farmers could no longer afford the inputs -- chemical fertilizers, genetically engineered seeds, pesticides...
Now the women of the Tumaini group are rejecting the methods and learning both new and traditional ways of farming... In doing so, they are also rejecting the latest scheme by the Global North to cure Africa of hunger and poverty, the so-called 'New Green Revolution.'... [Josphat] Ngonyo, director of the African Network for Animal Welfare and member of the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, states... 'Why do you want to spread the very same farming methods that have made our farmers poor and hungry?'...
Again and again, the farmers we met discussed the importance of controlling their own food source -- what the international peasant movement La Via Campesina calls 'food sovereignty.' Food sovereignty, as defined in the 'Declaration of Nyeleni,' a document produced by a gathering of farmers in Mali in 2007, is the 'right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produces through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.' Food sovereignty requires the democratization of our food system, with people, not corporations, in control...
Farmers all over the world, the majority of whom are women, are insisting on their right to food sovereignty, and placing seed at the center of that fight... growing a variety of crops appropriate to their region and their culture.
